Catalogic’s in-place approach to Pure Storage snapshot management has significant advantages over alternatives in that it requires no additional infrastructure for the user to purchase and manage, and leverages the existing Pure Storage production environment rather than requiring the creation of a fully redundant environment for the copies of the production data.

Pure Storage Demo Videos

IT Present and Future: A #CUBEConversation with Pure Storage and Catalogic Software

In this wide-ranging discussion, Vaughn Stewart, VP of Technology at Pure Storage, and Prashant Jagannathan, Technical Director at Catalogic Software, sit down with John Furrier of The Cube to cover IT both now and where it’s going in the future. As Stewart notes, Catalogic "fills a huge gap in the market" and allows users to accelerate their copy operations for use cases such as enhanced data protection, faster and more efficient software dev-test, and easier movement to cloud-like functionality in the data center.

Comprehensive support for all Pure Storage FlashArray systems

Catalogic ECX comprehensively supports the full line of Pure Storage FlashArray systems, including the //M10, //M20, //M50 and //M70, as well as the latest FlashArray//X. Because ECX makes use of the Pure Storage FlashRecover copy engine, it takes full advantage of the exceptional FlashReduce data reduction features of the Pure Storage array. Pure Storage snapshots Copies and replicas created by ECX are automatically space efficient and high performance, without the need for any system tuning. Catalogic also supports the previous generation of Pure Storage, the FA-400 series.

ECX provides push-button recovery at both the data level and the system level. Data level recovery provides mounting and mapping read/write snapshots to systems over iSCSI or FC. (Oracle users can drive ECX data recovery via RMAN.) System recovery spins up a full recovery stack – including storage, networking and compute – of one or more systems in a pre-defined recovery sequence. No more messy runbooks or complex recovery scripts!

ECX catalogs all snapshots and replicas for rapid discovery when required, and alerts you if a snap or replication job was missed or failed via automated SLA reporting that provides a comprehensive view of protection levels.

The speed and effectiveness of development and test processes are most often limited by the time it takes to provision IT infrastructure, especially for large objects like Oracle or SQL Server databases. Typical organizations take weeks to deploy infrastructure; even the most efficient can take several days. With Catalogic ECX and Pure Storage, Dev-Test or DevOps infrastructure can be spun up in minutes, either on an automated, scheduled basis or with push-button ease on demand. ECX users have reduced dev-test infrastructure management time by as much as 99%.

Test operations can use Pure Storage snapshots on production arrays with no impact to performance. If array separation is preferred, Catalogic can drive array-to-array replication and bring up test environments on the secondary system.

IT staff workloads can be further reduced by using Catalogic to deliver a user self-service portal. Development teams, testers, QA and others can request and provision their own copies of data without IT intervention, but always within usage boundaries set by IT.

Because all ECX functions are accessible via a documented REST API interface, developers can integrate ECX infrastructure automation with popular DevOps tools such as Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, etc. Pre-defined integration scripts and plug-ins make it easy for developers to spin up full stack infrastructure via a few simple lines of code. In this way, DevOps teams using Pure Storage have the same agility as those running in the cloud, but are able to use vital system-of-record data in their development processes. ECX also provides necessary data masking functionality for Oracle and MS SQL Server databases to provide information security.

Snapshot and Replication Automation for Pure Storage

Pure Storage FlashArray provides highly efficient, high-performance snapshot and replication technology. Catalogic ECX offers an easy-to-use snapshot, replication and clone automation solution that provides application and VMware integration, policy-based management, user self-service and many other features, all without the need for scripting. Unlike other copy data solutions, Catalogic’s unique in-place approach leverages Pure Storage FlashRecover technology and does not require any additional storage hardware. This webinar will show how Catalogic can take a Pure Storage investment to the next level.

This white paper walks through the steps required to configure Catalogic ECX when used with Pure Storage FlashArray in an Oracle database environment. It covers both creating copies and then using them. Use data scenarios include Oracle Dev-Test automation, DevOps automation and business analytics.

15

Oracle Database Protection and Recovery Using Pure Storage Snapshots

This detailed, 15 minute video provides a full demonstration of Pure Storage and Catalogic ECX with a Linux instance of Oracle. It walks you through all the steps: registering the Oracle server, automatically discovering data LUNs, setting up and taking snapshots, and recovering a database. Optional features such as RMAN integration, archive log backup and data masking are also shown. Learn how easy it is to protection and recovery Oracle, as well as using Oracle copies for purposes such as Oracle dev-test.

The most important functions of a database administrator are to have a recovery plan and a database backup in place, both tested and valid. The Catalogic ECX Copy Data Management platform, together with the Pure Storage FlashArray, provides features to achieve quick, application-consistent SQL Server database recovery and replication to test backups.

This five minute demo video shows how easily you can create and run automated, non-disruptive disaster recovery testing using Catalogic ECX and Pure Storage FlashRecover snapshots. By following a one-time simple wizard setup, DR tests will run automatically based on set schedules.

Learn More

In Their Words

“ECX delivers “in-place” copy data management to enterprise storage arrays, allowing the IT team to make use of its existing infrastructure and data in a manner that is efficient, automated, scalable, and easy to use. Catalogic ECX modernizes IT processes, enables key use cases, and does it all without additional hardware. ECX solves particularly acute pain points in Oracle environments that always entail the need for frequent cloning of DBs. Oracle integration delivers application-aware support for Oracle databases, including point-in-time recovery, data masking, RMAN integration, and other Oracle-specific capabilities.”

— ESG Lab Review

From the Blog

It was only three months ago that I blogged about the new vProtect release. And now it’s time for another one! Hot from the developers’ keyboards comes vProtect v 3.7, the Multiverse release. Why Multiverse? Because it’s opening up new worlds.